Air-fare Web Site Gets Mixed Review

Business Travel

Thirty of the world's biggest airlines are contributing to the most recent permutation of that seemingly endless quest of the traveler: How do I find the cheapest possible air fare?

This particular effort is named Orbitz, it's going to be yet another site on the World Wide Web, and it's scheduled to debut next summer.

Of course, if you're among the more than 40 percent of people in the United States who don't have access to the Internet and are unlikely to get it, then you'll not be enjoying what the airlines involved say will be the greatest gift they've ever given to seekers of low fares.

Orbitz, using powerful software developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will make available online all the special Internet fares that travelers now can find only by going to individual airline Web sites.

These are fares, the carriers say, that won't be available from other travel Web sites or through travel agents.

Of the largest U.S. airlines, only Southwest, which does quite well selling its own low fares on the Web, is unlikely to participate in Orbitz.

But the Orbitz-ing airlines face a daunting list of hurdles to get the site under way, including investigations by competition regulators at the U.S. departments of Justice and Transportation and members of Congress. Groups representing consumers, business travelers and travel agents are also opposed.

No one disputes that fares overall are lower today, by about a third, than they probably would have been if the airline business had not been deregulated more than two decades ago.

But after a summer of discontent over delayed flights, almost two years of a growing disgruntlement about passenger service and business-traveler unhappiness over high fares and limited competition in many cities, this is not a particularly good time for airlines to form what looks like a cozy new club.

"What we need is competition among airlines," said Mark Silbergeld, co-director of Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports magazine, at an Internet Competition Summit in Washington last month.